Today's Pix

Take a little break - then get back at it.

(click on it)

Today's Tweet

In his defense, this is a recording from a time well before Mr Pence became Senior White House Fluffer.

And besides, everybody (ie: every Republican) gets a Perpetual-Motion Mulligan, because apparently, all those "immutable religious tenets" are situational now. So you can bend them and shape them and pound them into any configuration necessary, in order to smash-fit them around any given political circumstance.

WATCH: "Is adultery no longer a big deal in Indiana and in America? I for one believe the 7th commandment is STILL a big deal. It's the most important promise you'll ever make. And holding people accountable to those promises...what could possibly be a BIGGER deal?" Mike Pence pic.twitter.com/tixVisZvaP

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) February 8, 2018

 

These people have no soul and no honor.

This Is It

I don't like it, but here it is.

Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes in The Atlantic:

A few days after the Democratic electoral sweep this past November in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere, The Washington Post asked a random Virginia man to explain his vote. The man, a marketing executive named Toren Beasley, replied that his calculus was simply to refuse to calculate. “It could have been Dr. Seuss or the Berenstain Bears on the ballot and I would have voted for them if they were a Democrat,” he said. “I might do more analyses in other years. But in this case, no. No one else gets any consideration because what’s going on with the Republicans—I’m talking about Trump and his cast of characters—is stupid, stupid, stupid. I can’t say stupid enough times.”

This, then, is the article we thought we would never write: a frank statement that a certain form of partisanship is now a moral necessity. The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy. The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus that made a conscious decision to enable him. In a two-party system, nonpartisanship works only if both parties are consistent democratic actors. If one of them is not predictably so, the space for nonpartisans evaporates. We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to do as Toren Beasley did: vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).


Two things up at the front:

People doing things mindlessly is a big reason we're in this jam to begin with. But it seems that's how the Republican brain works now, and so maybe these two guys figure, "if that's what got us here, that's what gets outa here" (?)

Second, it's important to remind these guys (guys like Rauch and Wittes) that maybe if they hadn't been sitting on their hands for the last 30 years, we wouldn't be quite so deep in the shit now.

On we go:

One more nonreason for our stance: that we are horrified by the president. To be sure, we are horrified by much that Trump has said and done. But many members of his party are likewise horrified. Republicans such as Senators John McCain and Bob Corker and Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, as well as former Governors Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, have spoken out and conducted themselves with integrity.
"...conducted themselves with integrity."  Except that those first 4 guys have voted to fuck over millions of us, practically at every opportunity.  Every one of them is All In on the policies - they just don't like 45*'s Trailer Trash Approach. An approach, btw, the Right Wing Dis-InfoTainment Complex has been pimping for those same 30 years.

I'm certainly not the first to point any of this out (see: driftglass and Blue Gal), but we have to keep repeating it until it starts to sink in - what these guys are trying to do is to build lifeboats. They're already rebranding the shitty monster they've allowed the GOP to become by calling it "Trumpism". They intend to set fire to it and escape, watching it sink, as they sidle up to the rest of us and pretend they had nothing to do with any of it.

AKA: The arsonist wants credit for his courageous efforts in fighting the fire.

And get this:

 Abandoning an entire party means abandoning many brave and honorable people. We would not do that based simply on rot at the top.

Uhh - fellas, that "rot" didn't get to the top without a shitload of support from the bottom, and the bottom doesn't support the Rot-At-The-Top without a shitload of support and direction coming from The Rot At The Top.

Then this (which goes to the very heart of the problem):

Future generations of scholars will scrutinize the many weird ways that Trump has twisted the GOP.

No.

Ah, hell no.

And No fuckin' way.

Trump hasn't twisted anything. A twisted GOP made Trump not just possible or probable - but inevitable.

But since even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while, these guys are making one thing very clear - we still have a decent chance to start putting things right.

SHOW UP OR SHUT UP

Today's Tweet

I'm certainly not crazy about adding to the orbital junk heap, but this is pretty cool.

View from SpaceX Launch Control. Apparently, there is a car in orbit around Earth. pic.twitter.com/QljN2VnL1O

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2018

 

Just Like Black Jesus

So maybe he wasn't really walking on water. Eyewitness accounts can be pretty iffy.

Today's Tweet

More hostages for the GOP.

I wonder if a Debt Ceiling deal might hinge on Dems being willing to fuck over a whole lot more people:

• Community Health Centers
• DACA
• Social Security
• Medicare
• Medicaid

124 days ago, Congress let funding for community health centers lapse.

And that has quietly created a new health care crisis for 26 million Americans. https://t.co/gw4t6UWmTR pic.twitter.com/ijeQ3CJFqq

— Vox (@voxdotcom) February 4, 2018

These guys.

Y'know what we call somebody who's always looking to make people live at the broken end of the bottle - all the time; every day?

We call them assholes.

We call them terrorists.

And right now, right here in USAmerica Inc, we call them Republicans.

Today's Tweet

Well - a coupla days ago anyway.

Twitter is stunned at just how gigantic a fake Paul Ryan is.
Silly Twitter.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) February 3, 2018

 

Science, Bitches

This was a real 'holy fuck' moment for me.  

Of course, I also get a moment of 'holy fuck I'm ignorant' because I have a kid (almost 40 years younger than I am) who knows all about this shit - and gets a wry smile on his face whenever I bring it up.

Today's Pix

Today's Tweet

Fun Fact: 3:00AM in Washington is 11:00AM in Moscow.

A good time for the Kremlin; they've sorted thru yesterday's news, and they've had a couple of meetings to settle on 3 or 4 Action Items, and it's time to send instructions to 45*.

They didn't even have to get up early or anything.

"The Memo Reveals the Coup" is trending. It couldn't be Russian bots, right? I'm sure tens of thousands of Americans got up between 2AM and 5AM on a Saturday morning to tweet about the vacuous #NothingBurgerMemo. Indeed, #TheMemoRevealsTheDupe.

— Eric Davies (@edavies) February 3, 2018

 

Today's Buzz

Buzz Burbank News and Comment:

The Shearer Dossier:

Unlike Steele, Shearer does not have a background in espionage, and his memo was initially viewed with scepticism, not least because he had shared it with select media organisations before the election.

However, the Guardian has been told the FBI investigation is still assessing details in the “Shearer memo” and is pursuing intriguing leads.

One source with knowledge of the inquiry said the fact the FBI was still working on it suggested investigators had taken an aspect of it seriously.


TrumpIsNotAboveTheLaw.org

Enter your zip code and get ready to hit the streets.

Pay close attention at about 44:10 - when Buzz Points out that we're still pretty much the Stoopid Country.

Today's Today

I've always had a hard time remembering what the whole groundhog thing meant.

Here's a handy updated guide:

That Right There

I've not seen a better example of someone being hermetically sealed in a bubble of deliberate ignorance.

It's the Post-Truth-Only-My-Opinion-Matters-Please-Jesus-Bring-The-Apocalypse-So-I-Don't-Hafta-Admit-To-Myself-I'm-Full-Of-Shit Blues

Fish gotta swim
Birds gotta fly
Rubes gotta rube
And we all know why

About Last Night

I didn't watch the SOTU - for the first time in a very long time. 

I decided instead to binge "Dirty Money" on Netflix (which was even more depressing), and then I switched to picking fly shit out of my pepper shaker because that at least retains a tiny bit of entertainment value.

First blush - WaPo:

Have a president’s words ever rung more hollow? In his first State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Trump spoke of “what kind of nation we are going to be. All of us, together, as one team, one people and one American family.” Yet Mr. Trump could not avoid, even for an hour, lacing his address with divisive references to hot-button issues and graceless attacks on his predecessors: to “disastrous Obamacare,” “the mistakes of past administrations,” “the era of economic surrender” and more.

You caught that, right? Translation: "You look like me and you think like me and you act like me, or you get the fuck out."

Cult45 devotees believe America is some kind of social club, and the first order of business is to keep people out of it.

More to the point, he offered little reason to hope that his second-year policies would be more constructive than those of his first. The president spent the past year attacking America’s democratic institutions and splitting the “American family.” His concern for building “one team” has not stopped him from ramping up deportations of harmless people or imperiling the future of the “dreamers,” all of whom have played their part on the American team. His desire for bipartisanship has not led him to negotiate with Democrats in good-faith on health care, taxes or immigration. His search for unity did not stop him Tuesday from taking a gratuitous dig at football players who kneel during the national anthem. As he took a victory lap on the economy, Mr. Trump displayed his typical indifference to the truth, claiming he “enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history.” They are not.

So, typical of the Daddy State, the "speech" was a fair demonstration that it takes about 90 minutes for a below-average rooster to claim credit for the sunrise, and to intimidate the other chickens by flapping his wings a lot and strutting around desperately pretending not to know that most of us can see him for the phony tin-plated martinet that he so obviously is.

- and this doozy from Ed Rogers:

Oh, and by the way, you probably haven’t heard much of this from the liberal mainstream media, but Democrats could not appear more fractured in the aftermath of Trump’s State of the Union address. Democrats scheduled six separate responses to the president’s address...

No, Ed - there were six responses (and more than that number were justified, I think) because that's just how bad your "president" has stunk up the joint.

For all you "Yeah-but-the-Dems-don't-have-a-message" dolts in the immediate vicinity:  Oh for fuck's sake.

First, stop thinking you can talk some sense into the rubes - you're not The Idiot Meat-Bag Whisperer.

Second, "What Message?" Pick a fucking message; any fucking message. We heard exactly the same 10 or 12 policy messages  from the SOTU Responders last night that Hillary and Bernie and many others spent all of 2016 trying to get across to us.

Economic equity
Infrastructure
Training and/or schooling
Equal rights
Rule of law
Environment
and
and
and

But no - Fart Breathers like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon saw large numbers of rubes who were making the deliberate choice to be deaf and blind, and they decided the only possible conclusion was that Hillary had gone mute.

Of course, you can only make that stick if you assume 2016 happened under "normal" circumstances - which brings us back around to the simple fact that way too many of us are trying to pretend "The Presumption Of Regularity" is still valid and in place. It isn't.

BTW: Hey, Press Poodles - we know y'all went to school and learnt your-bad-selfs a right big bunch about how this politics bidness is supposed to work; and we know you're just dyin' to show that off a little. We get it.

But here's the thing: All of that's about halfway down inside the dung heap now.  So stop looking for every goddamned opportunity to show us what you think you know about how things oughta be, and start reporting on the way things are.

We're all being buried in this shit pile together, so you can be all college-y and impressive later - for right now, we need you on a shovel.

Today's Quote

"I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is, for the most part, inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past, people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'facts' existed and were more or less discoverable.

And in practice, there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other.

It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that Totalitarianism destroys."

--George Orwell, On The Spanish Civil War